Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/22

 munion, and going to church. Not that he knew the convictions of his brother and had joined them, not that he had decided on anything in his mind, but only because the sentence which his brother had uttered was like the pressure exerted with a finger against a wall which was ready to fall of its own weight; the sentence was merely an indication that where he thought there was faith there had long been a vacant spot, and that, therefore, the words which he spoke and the signs of the cross and the obeisances which he made during his praying were quite meaningless actions. Since he had come to recognize their meaninglessness, he could not keep them up any longer.

Thus it has always been with an enormous majority of people. I am speaking of people of our degree of culture, of people who are true to themselves, and not of those who use the very subject of faith as a means for obtaining any temporary ends. (These people are most confirmed unbelievers, for, if the faith is to them a means for obtaining any social advantages, it is no longer faith.) The people of our degree of education are in that condition when the light of knowledge and of life has melted the artificial structure, and they have either noticed it and have cleared the place, or have not yet noticed it.

The religious teaching which was imparted to me in my childhood disappeared in me just as in others, with this difference only that, since I began to read philosophical works at fifteen years of age, my apostasy very early became conscious. With my sixteenth year I quit praying and through my own initiative stopped attending church and preparing myself for communion. I did not believe in what I had been told in my childhood, but I believed in something. I should never have been able to say what it was I believed in. I believed in God, or, more correctly, I did not deny God, but what kind of a God, I should have been at a loss to say. Nor did I deny